Sadistic and gun-brandishing cops with a taste for violence. The prelude to a gang rape in Doc's drugstore. Grungy and menacing gang members. The mean and ugly streets they call home - and for which they'll go to war.

The "West Side Story" that debuted on Broadway in 2009 and spawned the touring company now at the Marcus Center isn't the version you'll remember from past revivals, or the 1961 movie - beautiful to watch but frozen in time. | April 11, 2012»Read Full Article(3)

It's enough to whip a food lover into a frenzy: an event that combines top chefs and bartenders and the "it" meat of the moment -- pork. From heritage breeds of pig, at that.

The SloPig event opens its doors at the InterContinental Milwaukee on Sunday evening, allowing guests to roam the space and sample about 50 pork-centric dishes and eight kinds of punch. The chefs and bartenders are in competition to see whose plate and whose punch is named the best. | April 20, 2012»Read Full Blog Post

Good writing about music leads us to hear a recording in more detail, or in a new way. When a musician is also a perceptive writer about music, that's a double win for the reader-listener.

I recently picked up Bill Janovitz's 2005 book on the Rolling Stones' "Exile on Main Street," one of the many entries in Continuum's 33 1/3 series on individual albums. Janovitz, who modestly bills himself as "Part Time Man of Rock" on his website, is the singer-guitarist for the band Buffalo Tom and a solo songwriter and performer. Based on his "Exile" book, he is also an excellent writer and explainer. While he presents his own credentials as a musician humbly in the book, he brings an informed musical perspective to his writing about the Stones' 1972 recording: | April 20, 2012»Read Full Blog Post

Gallery Night marks the debut ot the Pfister Hotel's newest artist in residence, Timothy Westbrook. Westbrook started settling into his studio, just off of the hotel's lobby, a few weeks ago. He's the fourth artist to participate in the program and the first from out of state.

New to Milwaukee, Westbrook says the community support and involvement he's getting is better than he could have imagined. Already he feels at home, he says. | April 20, 2012»Read Full Blog Post

The idea of bulldozing the Brutalist student union at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and putting an environmentally responsible and homey, if attention-getting and glassy, contemporary building in its place was exciting enough to get students to vote overwhelmingly to increase their own fees.

The Journal Sentinel article about the student referendum, which recently passed by a whopping 3-to-1 margin, announced that UWM “wants its own Calatrava – an iconic landmark like the winged expansion of the Milwaukee Art Museum that wows visitors and symbolizes a soaring future.” | April 20, 2012»Read Full Blog Post(21)

Remember those 1970s commercials for the Evelyn Wood speed-reading courses? Lawyers, college students and housewives rapidly slipped their fingers over lines of text and entire pages. They attested to their amazing abilities for “dynamic comprehension.”

I wish I could say Gallery Night & Day offered that kind of promise for taking in art. The not-so-secret secret about the citywide quarterly art event when venues hold special events and receptions, scheduled for Friday evening and Saturday, April 20 and 21, is that it is not the greatest strategy for seeing art in both volume and depth. | April 20, 2012»Read Full Blog Post(3)

After Miranda Lambert and her five-piece band celebrated the memory of Levon Helm with a rousing rendition of The Band's "Up on Cripple Creek" Thursday night at the Bradley Center, the singer told the crowd, "Y'all need to listen to some older music."

"I can say that," she continued with a laugh, "because I am almost 30." | April 20, 2012»Read Full Article

Happy 75th birthday to George Takei, who played Mr. Sulu, helmsman of the USS Startship Enterprise on "Star Trek." In 1984 during, presumably, a slow period in his career Takei taped a public service announcement for the Milwaukee County Transit System.

"When I'm out in space, I use the Starship Enterprise to get around," he says in the spot. | April 20, 2012»Read Full Blog Post(1)

Good news for all budding stop motion animators in town - your painstakingly slow art form has found new life.

In recent weeks, not one but two bands have used stop motion in their videos. Undoubtedly it took 'em, like, forever to get the few minutes of jittery footage. But it's still a nifty effect. | April 20, 2012»Read Full Blog Post

In Milwaukee, we know our “Prosits.” We know how to brew in Our Town, and more and more mini-brewers are doing it. Just in time for Milwaukee Beer Week (which starts Friday), writer Kathy Flanigan explores why craft beers are foaming in Brewtown. See her Weekend Cue discoveries here.

Summerfest has announced the dates and times for the headliners on the Briggs & Stratton Big Backyard with Coors Light and Tap Milwaukee. A July 5 headliner is to be announced. Summerfest is closed on Monday, July 2.